


We Never Stopped

by Happy9450



Category: The Newsroom
Genre: F/M, Far in the future
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-26
Updated: 2014-09-26
Packaged: 2018-02-18 20:01:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2360459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Happy9450/pseuds/Happy9450





	We Never Stopped

"Mum. Mum."

Dan McAvoy repeated it, gazing numbly at her frozen features. His mother sat on the sofa in the family room off the kitchen, a room that they all called the "morning room" since that was the name his Gran had given it when she had lived here raising his mother and uncles. His mother was dressed in light khaki slacks that she still called trousers, Tom's shoes and a soft grey cashmere pull over. Her silver hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Her hands were resting in her lap, the right one clutching a crumpled tissue. Her face was puffy and pale, but composed. His father's oft repeated statement that MacKenzie McHale was the most attractive woman he had ever seen in real life echoed in Dan's brain, and fresh tears sprang into his eyes. When Dan thought of women aging spectacularly, the late Leona Lansing and his mother came first to mind. 

"Mum!" he said more forcefully.

Mac looked up into the face of her youngest child, who was now a grown man. A man who looked so much like his father that Mac had felt disoriented and as if she were thirty-five again the first few times she saw a bus go by displaying a new ACN advertisement that featured a headshot of Danny. It was no accident that his show was called "Sports Night with Dan McAvoy."

"Danny," she said simply. 

"I came as soon as I could, Mum. I spoke to Charlie. She and James and are packing, picking up Billy at school, and then they and the boys will be here as soon as they can. She said that Reese called and the jet couldn't get clearance to land at either Heathrow or Gatwick on such short notice so it's going to Manchester. They were going to fly commercial to Manchester, but someone . . . Uncle Tommy or James's dad . . . arranged for an RAF helicopter . . . so it's coming for them and they'll be here sooner. Aunt Ness is traveling with them too."

Charlotte had reversed her mother's journey and ended up living on the other side of the Pond. She had gotten a degree in art history at Princeton, and then a job at the Tate Modern, where she began hanging out with and then dating James Mountbatten-Windsor, a young assistant curator she had crossed paths with occasionally when they both were children. The next thing Will and Mac knew he was lifting a veil from in front of his daughter's face and resting it carefully on the Morgan tiara that MacKenzie had worn when she'd married him. An exchange of vows and rings and their daughter was Vicountess Severn, wife of the late Queen's youngest grandson. Mac would always treasure the memory of the expression that had come over her husband's face in their London hotel room when Will had opened the morning paper to the article announcing the birth of his first grandchild, the Honorable William Edward Charles Mountbatten-Windsor, and read that the tiny namesake he'd held in his arms the night before was thirteenth in line for the British throne. 

"Dunk was in court when I called," Danny went on, referring to his attorney brother, "but his assistant knew about Dad . . . Aunt Riv had called . . . she was crying . . . the assistant . . . said she'd been a Greater Fool in college and Dad had always been so friendly to her . . . . She said that Shelly had already arranged to have them shoot around her . . . which means that her producer knows that Dad's . . . dead . . . but she doesn't think he'll let it leak. Shelly was packing, arranging a flight, collecting the kids and would pick Dunk up at the office and take him straight to the airport." Dunk was a litigator with a mid-sized firm in Los Angeles. He was married to an actress in an ensemble cast on an HBO series and the father of three young children.

Mac nodded, still not trusting her voice, and squeezed his hand to signal that she was comforted by the thought of her children rushing to her side.

"I told Don . . . Uncle Don . . . but he was coming to tell me. I guess you called Aunt Sloan before you called me," Dan said referring to the President of the AWM News Division and his economist wife who were his parents' closest friends other than Aunt Rivka and Uncle Danny. His Aunt Riv had let him into the house, kissed him and disappeared. He'd been greatly relieved that his mother had not been sitting here alone since the paramedics had left with his father's body. 

Aunt Riv had also told him that Sarah had called and said she'd gotten his message and would be there as soon as she could get away from work. He and Sarah Shivitz had been trying to sort out their evolving relationship for some time now. He was convinced that he was in love with her. Sarah seemed wary of him ("I don't want to be friends with benefits"), and doubtful that he could have fallen in love with someone he'd known all his life. ("I pissed on you the first time you held me," she'd said. "You were six days old." "Exactly!"). But Dan was sure he'd heard her whisper, "I love you, Danny," the other night when she thought he'd fallen asleep. Right now, he just wanted to feel Sarah's arms around him. 

"What happened?" Dan asked suddenly, looking down at his mother. "He wasn't even sick, was he?" The anguish in his voice won out over his attempt to appear calm and rational.

His mother reached up and cupped his chin. "Daniel. Sweetheart. He was ninty-four. He had a great run. His mind was clear to the end. He just . . . stopped. Took a nap . . . Went to sleep and stopped. It was his time. It was us . . . we wanted him forever." Her voice broke on the last sentence.

Dan sat down beside her, wrapped his arms around his mother and began to sob. Despite her own tears, she rubbed his back in a pattern that he had known since birth. Maybe before birth, he thought. Mac was reminded as her fingers circled on her son's back, that it was a motion that Billy too had always found comforting, and was not unlike the pattern he traced on her back when she awoke from a nightmare. Again, the depth of her loss sliced through her.

"I just can't imagine you without him," Dan blurted out and then thought that it was an insensitive asshole thing to say to her right now.

She didn't react that way. Rather, she pulled back to look at him and said in a tone that conveyed both wonder and pain, "Danny, I can't even remember me without him. I was twenty-seven when he took me to Central Park to teach me to throw and catch an American football . . . . After that . . . ."

"He told me about that . . . " Dan interrupted, his face glowing, suddenly lost in the memory. "I was fourteen and I had a crush on this girl and I asked him how he'd kissed you for the first time . . . how did he make it happen, you know, like when and what moves did he use."

"He tackled me. Pulled me down on top of him."

"Well, you were trying to run the ball past him. Least that's what I remember him saying. Sounds to me like you were asking for it."

"I'm not sure he ever figured that out," she said slowly, lovingly. Mac smiled her "You're and Idiot, Billy" smile, looking into space, and Dan wondered, and not for the first time that day, if there was an afterlife, and if so, was there continued interaction with or at least awareness of the corporeal realm? If there was, he was sure that his Dad had already found his way back to Mum, and maybe could even see her smiling at him now. Dan had seen his mother give that look to his father thousands of times. It never failed to make him feel secure that all of the physical laws of the universe were functioning properly. 

"Then he made up a bogus rule about kissing," she said softly.

"Yeah," Dan laughed. "That sounded pretty dorky when I was fourteen." 

Mac laughed too. "I think you had to have been there. And he carried it off well." She chuckled again. "But, yeah, it was pretty dorky."

"He told me about the kiss." Now Dan's voice held wonder, love and nostalgia. "I felt so grown up. We were having this man to man conversation about sex." Dan leaned back as he spoke and crossed his leg, resting an ankle on his other knee, mimicking, Mac assumed, the "manly" pose he'd affected as a fourteen-year-old. Danny could tell a story every bit as as well as Will, who was famous for it. Mac could see her son relating a funny tale about his father on "The Tonight Show" or "Late Night." That sort of thing would be was coming soon she felt sure as "Sport's Night's" popularity grew . . . and now with Will gone there would be retrospectives and tributes . . . . Her mind added the last thought almost involuntarily.

"It was the first time he talked to me about having an erection," Dan said, bringing her back to the present.

Mac held his gaze, her eyes wide with revelation. Of course, Will had talked to his sons about sex, kissing and erections. Probably to Charlie too. She'd known that in a sort of abstract way. But hearing it from Danny's mouth and perspective was different. And she'd never imagined that Billy would talk to the children about their sex life! On the other hand, she reasoned, their sexual attraction was the context for it all . . . both Will's frame of reference for the experience and the very genesis of the people with whom he was discussing human intimacy. The thought made her smile even as another stab of want and loss rose up once again to squeeze her throat. 

"What else did Dad say about sex?"

"That whoever said that sex solves nothing . . . .

". . . was a person who wasn't having good sex." Mac finished with him, laughing.

"But he explained what he meant . . . that it had to go along with working on the relationship, facing facts, accepting differences of taste and opinion, all that sort of stuff. And his description of the day in the park . . . . That whole conversation wasn't just about sex," Dan continued. "I mean that was the cool part for me, and I was trying so hard to act like it was all old hat to me, but in an adult way, you know. Just two guys chewing the fat. But looking back on it, it's what he said about love and feeling attachment and energy with another human being that was important. I remember him saying that when he kissed you in the grass in the park, he experienced an electric current moving from point to point through his body and he knew exactly why Hindu mystics believed there were charkras that performed this function. That it was like some sort of life force flowing into him and making him live on a higher plane."

"A higher plane and with the biggest boner I'd ever felt in my life."

Now, it was Dan McAvoy's turn to gape. His seventy-nine year old mother just sat there demurely until after several seconds, he burst out laughing. 

"What?" Mac asked innocently, as her sportscaster son shook his head, smiling. "I was lying on top of him." Then she smiled at the recollection of those days. "By the following Tuesday . . . the park was Saturday . . . I'd worked up the courage to walk into his office and ask him if it had been a date, if we were dating," she said. "He just looked at me for an uncomfortably long time." She dragged out the last three words. "I stood there, frozen, chewing my lower lip, and waiting for the judgment of Solomon." 

Her mind drifted off to the recollection of Will telling her many years later that what he'd actually been thinking as he'd stared at her was, "Dating? Seriously? Dating? Am I dating you? Mac, I'm so fucking in love with you, I can't see straight." She brought herself back. 

"So, to keep myself from just bolting out of ACN, never to return, I thought up funny, irreverent things to say if he said, no." Dan snorted at that idea. Will McAvoy saying no to MacKenzie McHale. Surely the East River would have spontaneously erupted over its banks or the Empire State Building crumbled if that had happened. 

"The one I settled on was, 'Really? So you always carry sausage in your pocket.' Fortunately," she said smiling at Danny and caressing her son's cheek, "for all of us, he said that it had been a date and asked if I would like to go out with him again." Dan smiled and wiped his eyes.

"I'm glad you had those times with him," she continued, ". . . discussing my sex life." She paused and gave Dan a light elbow in the ribs. Then, her face softened with sadness. "Billy was such a brilliant father."

"Yes, he was." Dan agreed. 

"He so much wanted to do it . . . have kids . . . and at the same time, he was terribly insecure about his ability to be a good dad . . . ."

"Because of his father?" 

She nodded. "He was afraid that having no role model . . . hell, no frame of reference at all for how a loving, supportive parent is supposed to be . . . he wouldn't know what to do. But he did know. He knew instinctively because it was what he wanted to do. He wanted to love you and Charlie and Dunk. He wanted to protect you three and send you out into the world and laugh and cry with you."

"He did it right. I always felt loved and I always felt that he was there for me, win or lose. I can't believe he's gone. It did seem like he'd just be with us forever." Dan looked at his mother closely. "Are you going to be okay?"

"Yes," she said after a moment's consideration. "I will never stop missing him, but I'll be okay." She took a shaky breath. "Damned fourteen years, seven months." Dan knew she was referring to the amount older than she that his father had been. "I knew this day would come. But, it's silly . . . " She turned her face away from him.

"What's silly, Mum?"

"Oh, it's nothing . . . it's just that I'm a little afraid to sleep alone. It's been so long. He's always been there." She thought of their empty bed, which now seemed as big and cold as an ocean. It would never be warm again, not truly warm, not without Will to snuggle against. Oh, Billy, she thought, I want you back . . . I need you . . . . She tried to smile bravely but it was so forced, it pained Dan to see her attempt. He kissed her forehead, a gesture that made her think again of how like Will this child of theirs was.

"Mum, did you and Dad ever stop?" Dan blurted out suddenly. He looked slightly embarrassed, but very curious.

"Stop what?" Mac asked although she imagined that she knew. 

"Stop . . . you know . . . ." Now, Mac stifled a giggle, watching Danny struggle with his discomfort.

"Making love? That's a very personal question for a boy . . . man . . . to ask his mother." She said it as if seriously affronted, which assured Dan that she was kidding.

"Dad's touching you the way he did . . . you know . . . He was always running a hand down your arm or across your back or holding you against him or putting his arm around your waist or pulling you down into the chair or onto the sofa with him or kissing your hair . . . ." Dan smiled at the memories, and then noticing that his mother's tears had started to fall once again, he kissed her cheek. "It always made me feel safe and loved, seeing you two. I guess 'cause I came from that . . . I don't know, but even when I was a kid, or a teenager, it never seemed yucky to me . . . It just seemed normal and nice."

"No," she said softly. "No, Danny, we never stopped."


End file.
